I have been prediction for some time that still photography will actually become rare.
Try this little social experiment: 1. Ask a co-worker or friend if they would like to see a photo of your girlfriend/wife/kids. 2. Ask a co-worker if they would like to see an unedited video of the same (obviously not a naughty video).
A picture can also be printed out in meatspace and hung on your cube wall at work or put in a frame on your desk if you are truly old-school.
Good point. WAV doesn't show up in iTunes, and AIFF is not exactly universal despite supporting tags.
Of course, we've gotten away from the original topic, which is downloading music in FLAC. I don't really see the point, since most music sold isn't exactly audiophile material. When I was a kid, we happily bought stuff on tape or vinyl - which sounds like utter shit. People complain about an "artifact"... how about a record needle hitting a piece of dust for a big-ass "pop"... or the tape getting to the part where the tape deck ate it and it sounds like it's underwater? I always marveled at how clear the FM radio sounded until I got a CD player.
Ah, tagging. I forgot how clunky it was to get metadata to stick on a WAV. At least in iTunes... but then if you were using iTunes you'd just use Apple Lossless and turn on the setting to convert when transferring to your phone.
I investigated all of that crap years ago, and in the end decided that I don't listen to anything that couldn't be encoded at 128kbps MP3 with the crappy encoders from the 90s:) In 2003 when I converted all of my CDs, I chose to go with LAME using alt-extreme. I've never heard anything that bothered me about the encoding in my crappy 80s and 90s rock and pop music... Of course back then a hard drive was much smaller, and I couldn't afford lossless, let alone raw.
I can see how a jazz or classical aficionado might feel the need to protect their bits, but expecting hip-hop fans to clamor for slim shady and Rhianna in FLAC is a bit hilarious.
First, I disagree that raw (which might be.wav in this case) is more future-proof than FLAC. Because you can convert from FLAC back into an identical.wav. I tried this before I started coverting everything to FLAC.
That means you have to expend twice the effort for something that merely gains you half of your drive space, which by the time you needed to put it all back will be so cheap that you'll wonder what you were trying to accomplish in the first place.
Replay gain is cool, but can be added to any file that supports metadata. It's really a player feature, not a format feature.
I'm not saying FLAC is useless - it obviously works for you. But it is condemned to be a niche. People who want small file sizes have better options and people who want bit-for-bit reproductions of their CD can just keep the raw files, which then can be played on any player. Even Apple's stuff supports uncompressed WAV and AIFF.
At least Carter was willing to take an actual action and go visit the plant. If the people running the plant thought it was so bad, do you really think they would have let the President anywhere near it?
then we suddenly hear that the Japanese reactors are older than Chernobyl.
But not an older design. Between the containment vessel and the light water reactor design, nothing like Chernobyl will happen. Chernobyl had a fissile reaction going while open to the atmosphere. These plants ceased fission prior to the tsunami, and it is the leftover radioactivity that is melting the core. Yes, you'll get a bunch of radioactive steam released, and yes, this will probably increase the risk of cancer for people exposed in the immediate area for a few days, but it's not the same thing as Chernobyl.
And lets be clear - even Chernobyl is associated with perhaps 4000 deaths, and that includes the increased cancer risk. We regularly live with 30,000-40,000 deaths due to automobiles every single year in just the US, and you don't have the same kind of polarized, ill-informed discussion about our continuing expenditure on highways as our primary transportation choice.
I don't know if there are some safe nuclear plants.
You'd have to define "safe". Even with the accident in Japan, they seem pretty damned safe to me. They were washed over by a damn tidal wave after withstanding an earthquake - events that seem to have killed thousands. And yet, they might get blamed for just a handful of deaths themselves - and most of those will be people who work at the plant.
I don't need to understand the engineering issues to understand that there is no way to trust the pro-nuclear lobby to actually deal with those issues.
Maybe not, but then you do need to defer to people who do understand the engineering issues.
It's for doing the time consuming part of ripping music to, which is 'ripping and labeling', and then storing that before you do the irreversible part of lossy encoding.
That's the part I don't quite understand - why spend the extra effort over and above raw? Best case, you save a few $50 worth of hard drive space and still have to re-encode everything again for your other audio devices. What's the point?
The LED lights are priced with more profit which reduces the chance they're made with slave labor; just as important, you only have to buy them once.
Do you really think they don't maximize profits by reducing manufacturing costs? What makes you think that Phillips suddenly changes factory wages just because they make more per string?
Anyway, they need to last 6x longer than a regular string. Money has a time value, and since I usually get about 2 years out of a cheap set, I'm not willing to make a 12-year investment!
Where compression MAY still matter in the future isn't with storage, but transfer.
Then the lossy formats will still reign supreme.
There's just no real market for FLAC. It doesn't save enough space to make the hassle worth it for storage, and the lossy formats do better when you do need to save space. Raw is more future-proof than FLAC.
What makes you think that the LED lights are assembled by different people or with different quality? LEDs just cost more and use less energy. You can tell they use crappy materials by the way they flicker. Why put in a real power supply when it saves a few cents?
But if a new codec shows up 10 years from now you want to/need to use for some reason
I'm sorry, but do you really see mp3/aac compatibility EVER going away? At this point, storage is so cheap that more efficient compression just won't matter. FLAC only saves like 50% over raw PCM, so I'm not sure what we're chasing here. Is it really worth such a small compression ratio to be fighting this battle? Why even bother with the time and processing power?
and with consumers who lap up the shit gladly instead of doing some research to find a quality product.
Honestly, isn't quality just as negotiable as price? Let's say I can buy a "quality" lawn mower that is serviceable and with good parts availability for $300, and there is a piece of garbage Chinese lawnmower that is not serviceable for $100. I have to decide whether or not that good lawnmower is going to last 3x longer than the Chinese lawnmower, and whether the cost of labor/parts when it does break is going to approach the cost of a brand-new Chinese lawnmower.
Extend this argument to 99 cent strings of Christmas lights and $1 wine glasses, and it is clear that people aren't just "lapping up the shit" without some very good reason.
Now, I'm a stubborn old mule and so I still buy quality stuff much of the time - but I can hardly argue that I'm being sensible financially. I just don't like cheap shit!:)
It seems to me that government is less evil than corporations right now.
Corporations get their charter from the government, and are really just an extension of it. The government can make just about any rule that they want for corporations - the only hiccup being that a corporation can incorporate somewhere else. This is not a problem for communications services like the internet, which has to be local by definition. So I don't think it really matters whether the government runs the internet directly, or by proxy through corporations.
Yeah, it looks like he used the specs of the capacitors to estimate the 1MW. Which of course fails to take into account the efficiency of the laser and other losses:)
But it looks like his laser is doing what (surprise surprise) other people are doing with home-built lasers, so whatever the power it isn't a breakthrough - but it is in a cool-looking case!
Read through the YouTube comments. The builder himself says he thinks it is 10-100kW. I quoted him a few times here in the comments, so I don't really have the energy to do it again:)
Right, but lots of geeks have made lasers that shoot holes in stuff. He made a very cool case for his laser, which is awesome - but not quite what we were led to believe in the summary.
It's kind of like being promised that a guy gave his Civic 3000 HP, only to click on the link and find 300HP and a cool body mod. Still awesome, but not what got you to click on the link.
No, on the YouTube page the creator admits that it is probably between 10 and 100kW. He claims that he "could" make it 1MW, but that "no one cares":
Lets say 10kW to 100kW....noone cares btw;-)
I could make it 1MW.
We care, though, because while the cool part of this project is the package in the author's eyes, an awful lot of geeks' ears perk up when they hear "megawatt laser". The project is very cool, but not a breakthrough.
It is very cool - and that's why I'm not sure where the need to exaggerate is. The impressive part is the time he spent on the case. Many geeks have built equivalent lasers.
Besides a general sense of the state of the art? The "article" is a blog post that links to another blog post and YouTube. The owner of the YouTube video says:
Lets say 10kW to 100kW....noone cares btw;-)
I could make it 1MW.
So it sounds like I'm off by either 10 or 100 times, depending on whether the builder even knows!
Anyway, it's not terribly high-energy. He's putting out 0.1J maybe over 200ns?
Still very, very cool - I just wish the normal human urge to exaggerate wasn't being expressed.
In a generation or two even low-end graphics cards will probably have the power to play 1080p games at full detail.
I suspect you are right, and that there will be a race for power efficiency like there is today on tablets/phones. "High end" will still exist, but the definition will change to power/performance rather than just raw performance.
And of course, powerful video cards will always be appreciated in the rendering world.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been prediction for some time that still photography will actually become rare.
Try this little social experiment:
1. Ask a co-worker or friend if they would like to see a photo of your girlfriend/wife/kids.
2. Ask a co-worker if they would like to see an unedited video of the same (obviously not a naughty video).
A picture can also be printed out in meatspace and hung on your cube wall at work or put in a frame on your desk if you are truly old-school.
Assburgers taste better than they smell.
Good point. WAV doesn't show up in iTunes, and AIFF is not exactly universal despite supporting tags.
Of course, we've gotten away from the original topic, which is downloading music in FLAC. I don't really see the point, since most music sold isn't exactly audiophile material. When I was a kid, we happily bought stuff on tape or vinyl - which sounds like utter shit. People complain about an "artifact"... how about a record needle hitting a piece of dust for a big-ass "pop"... or the tape getting to the part where the tape deck ate it and it sounds like it's underwater? I always marveled at how clear the FM radio sounded until I got a CD player.
Ah, tagging. I forgot how clunky it was to get metadata to stick on a WAV. At least in iTunes... but then if you were using iTunes you'd just use Apple Lossless and turn on the setting to convert when transferring to your phone.
I investigated all of that crap years ago, and in the end decided that I don't listen to anything that couldn't be encoded at 128kbps MP3 with the crappy encoders from the 90s :) In 2003 when I converted all of my CDs, I chose to go with LAME using alt-extreme. I've never heard anything that bothered me about the encoding in my crappy 80s and 90s rock and pop music... Of course back then a hard drive was much smaller, and I couldn't afford lossless, let alone raw.
I can see how a jazz or classical aficionado might feel the need to protect their bits, but expecting hip-hop fans to clamor for slim shady and Rhianna in FLAC is a bit hilarious.
First, I disagree that raw (which might be .wav in this case) is more future-proof than FLAC. Because you can convert from FLAC back into an identical .wav. I tried this before I started coverting everything to FLAC.
That means you have to expend twice the effort for something that merely gains you half of your drive space, which by the time you needed to put it all back will be so cheap that you'll wonder what you were trying to accomplish in the first place.
Replay gain is cool, but can be added to any file that supports metadata. It's really a player feature, not a format feature.
I'm not saying FLAC is useless - it obviously works for you. But it is condemned to be a niche. People who want small file sizes have better options and people who want bit-for-bit reproductions of their CD can just keep the raw files, which then can be played on any player. Even Apple's stuff supports uncompressed WAV and AIFF.
And what I said goes double for Apple Lossless :)
"Perfectly safe, nothing to worry about." My ass.
At least Carter was willing to take an actual action and go visit the plant. If the people running the plant thought it was so bad, do you really think they would have let the President anywhere near it?
then we suddenly hear that the Japanese reactors are older than Chernobyl.
But not an older design. Between the containment vessel and the light water reactor design, nothing like Chernobyl will happen. Chernobyl had a fissile reaction going while open to the atmosphere. These plants ceased fission prior to the tsunami, and it is the leftover radioactivity that is melting the core. Yes, you'll get a bunch of radioactive steam released, and yes, this will probably increase the risk of cancer for people exposed in the immediate area for a few days, but it's not the same thing as Chernobyl.
And lets be clear - even Chernobyl is associated with perhaps 4000 deaths, and that includes the increased cancer risk. We regularly live with 30,000-40,000 deaths due to automobiles every single year in just the US, and you don't have the same kind of polarized, ill-informed discussion about our continuing expenditure on highways as our primary transportation choice.
I don't know if there are some safe nuclear plants.
You'd have to define "safe". Even with the accident in Japan, they seem pretty damned safe to me. They were washed over by a damn tidal wave after withstanding an earthquake - events that seem to have killed thousands. And yet, they might get blamed for just a handful of deaths themselves - and most of those will be people who work at the plant.
I don't need to understand the engineering issues to understand that there is no way to trust the pro-nuclear lobby to actually deal with those issues.
Maybe not, but then you do need to defer to people who do understand the engineering issues.
It's for doing the time consuming part of ripping music to, which is 'ripping and labeling', and then storing that before you do the irreversible part of lossy encoding.
That's the part I don't quite understand - why spend the extra effort over and above raw? Best case, you save a few $50 worth of hard drive space and still have to re-encode everything again for your other audio devices. What's the point?
The LED lights are priced with more profit which reduces the chance they're made with slave labor; just as important, you only have to buy them once.
Do you really think they don't maximize profits by reducing manufacturing costs? What makes you think that Phillips suddenly changes factory wages just because they make more per string?
Anyway, they need to last 6x longer than a regular string. Money has a time value, and since I usually get about 2 years out of a cheap set, I'm not willing to make a 12-year investment!
And I think the flickering looks terrible.
Do I ever see it going away? Yes.
Then we fellow Nostrodamasus disagree :)
Where compression MAY still matter in the future isn't with storage, but transfer.
Then the lossy formats will still reign supreme.
There's just no real market for FLAC. It doesn't save enough space to make the hassle worth it for storage, and the lossy formats do better when you do need to save space. Raw is more future-proof than FLAC.
What makes you think that the LED lights are assembled by different people or with different quality? LEDs just cost more and use less energy. You can tell they use crappy materials by the way they flicker. Why put in a real power supply when it saves a few cents?
But if a new codec shows up 10 years from now you want to/need to use for some reason
I'm sorry, but do you really see mp3/aac compatibility EVER going away? At this point, storage is so cheap that more efficient compression just won't matter. FLAC only saves like 50% over raw PCM, so I'm not sure what we're chasing here. Is it really worth such a small compression ratio to be fighting this battle? Why even bother with the time and processing power?
and with consumers who lap up the shit gladly instead of doing some research to find a quality product.
Honestly, isn't quality just as negotiable as price? Let's say I can buy a "quality" lawn mower that is serviceable and with good parts availability for $300, and there is a piece of garbage Chinese lawnmower that is not serviceable for $100. I have to decide whether or not that good lawnmower is going to last 3x longer than the Chinese lawnmower, and whether the cost of labor/parts when it does break is going to approach the cost of a brand-new Chinese lawnmower.
Extend this argument to 99 cent strings of Christmas lights and $1 wine glasses, and it is clear that people aren't just "lapping up the shit" without some very good reason.
Now, I'm a stubborn old mule and so I still buy quality stuff much of the time - but I can hardly argue that I'm being sensible financially. I just don't like cheap shit! :)
It seems to me that government is less evil than corporations right now.
Corporations get their charter from the government, and are really just an extension of it. The government can make just about any rule that they want for corporations - the only hiccup being that a corporation can incorporate somewhere else. This is not a problem for communications services like the internet, which has to be local by definition. So I don't think it really matters whether the government runs the internet directly, or by proxy through corporations.
Yes, it is. But socialism can be good - the parent was making a funny :)
Yeah, it looks like he used the specs of the capacitors to estimate the 1MW. Which of course fails to take into account the efficiency of the laser and other losses :)
But it looks like his laser is doing what (surprise surprise) other people are doing with home-built lasers, so whatever the power it isn't a breakthrough - but it is in a cool-looking case!
Again, if you read through the previous comments you'll see that I confess to being off by an order of magnitude myself.
Read through the YouTube comments. The builder himself says he thinks it is 10-100kW. I quoted him a few times here in the comments, so I don't really have the energy to do it again :)
He's got a cool, hand-held -laser gun-
Right, but lots of geeks have made lasers that shoot holes in stuff. He made a very cool case for his laser, which is awesome - but not quite what we were led to believe in the summary.
It's kind of like being promised that a guy gave his Civic 3000 HP, only to click on the link and find 300HP and a cool body mod. Still awesome, but not what got you to click on the link.
No, on the YouTube page the creator admits that it is probably between 10 and 100kW. He claims that he "could" make it 1MW, but that "no one cares":
We care, though, because while the cool part of this project is the package in the author's eyes, an awful lot of geeks' ears perk up when they hear "megawatt laser". The project is very cool, but not a breakthrough.
It is very cool - and that's why I'm not sure where the need to exaggerate is. The impressive part is the time he spent on the case. Many geeks have built equivalent lasers.
Besides a general sense of the state of the art? The "article" is a blog post that links to another blog post and YouTube. The owner of the YouTube video says:
So it sounds like I'm off by either 10 or 100 times, depending on whether the builder even knows!
Anyway, it's not terribly high-energy. He's putting out 0.1J maybe over 200ns?
Still very, very cool - I just wish the normal human urge to exaggerate wasn't being expressed.
1kW, not 1MW.
Surely you jest? They sell more than anyone else.
In a generation or two even low-end graphics cards will probably have the power to play 1080p games at full detail.
I suspect you are right, and that there will be a race for power efficiency like there is today on tablets/phones. "High end" will still exist, but the definition will change to power/performance rather than just raw performance.
And of course, powerful video cards will always be appreciated in the rendering world.